Sunday, February 7, 2016

Franchise restored

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in January 2003)

Nowadays,
there are more movie “franchises” than any of us can count, but before Star Wars there was only one – James
Bond. Growing up in the UK in the early 70s, I remember a new Bond movie as a
genuine event, and so was the traditional Christmas Day TV Bond film (there
were only three channels, so a huge audience was guaranteed). Roger Moore was
the epitome of a movie star at the time. Now there’s come career mismanagement
for you. I just looked him up on the Internet Movie Database and scanned his
recent list of work. The last time I saw that much obscure junk was when I
cleaned out the closet.

A life with Bond

Back then
I went along with the excitement when it seemed appropriate, but I don’t
remember ever really being that big a Bond fan. I’m not a huge action
aficionado by nature (of course, as a kid you’d tend to keep this kind of
reservation to yourself), and even then, I think the repetitiveness of the
format was a bit wearisome to me. Moore was the kind of upper-crust Englishman
who left me cold, and Connery, with his remarkable Untouchables-inspired resurgence still years ahead of him, was
yesterday’s man. I was too young for the women to be a major compensation,
although I do seem to remember Barbara Bach making a distinct impression on me
in The Spy who Loved Me. But she also
epitomizes how the movies were barely fending off official schlock status – in
the Moore era they were full of people like Britt Ekland and Richard Kiel and
Corinne Clery, actors whose natural playing ground was cheap Euro-trash, and in
some cases soft porn.

By the
end of the Moore era I wasn’t paying attention at all, and although Timothy
Dalton was less of a walking joke than Moore was at the end, the movies didn’t
get much better. Pierce Brosnan has been a good Bond I guess, but I couldn’t
tell you a single thing about any of his three films. The last one, The World is Not Enough, seemed to me to
lack a single distinguishing feature. I only saw it in the first place because
I was stuck in St. Albert, Alberta for Christmas with nothing better to do, and
that wasn’t the case this year, so I was assuming I’d give the 20th
and latest entry, Die Another Day, a
miss.

But then
the reviews came out, and were pretty good, and the prospect of a Bond movie
directed by Lee Tamahori, the guy who made Once
Were Warriors, and with Halle Berry (I’m somewhat better able to appreciate
those compensations now) piqued my interest. So I went for it. And I’m glad I
did. It’s the best Bond movie for a long time – perhaps since the 60s.

Die Another Day

I must
admit though that my reasons for saying this are largely rooted in matters
arguably antithetical to the Bond concept – Die
Another Day comes close to being the Bond movie for people who don’t like
Bond. Following a typically high-voltage opening sequence, he’s caught and
thrown into a North Korean jail, where he’s confined and tortured for over a
year. The West trades him out, but he’s suspected of having broken under
pressure, and he’s thrown aside, his license revoked. On the trail of whomever
set him up, he makes his way to Cuba, where Berry emerges from the ocean in her
already iconic orange bikini. One scene later, she’s in bed with him.

The
opening stretches strip the character pretty comprehensively of his superhuman
qualities, before gradually allowing most of it back in. But even then, the
movie contains several moments where Bond needs a major assist to save his
skin, and Berry is a much more equal partner than most of the women who’ve gone
before her (although she’s still a bit under-utilized). Her first scene with
Bond is, in a way, a typical piece of glib double-entendre, but because we know
Bond is still shaky from his ordeal (and that he hasn’t had an action for well
over a year) and because she’s so much more assured from the norm, it carries a
different dynamic than we’re used to. When we find out she’s an agent as well,
their relationship takes on the rather desperate, needy air of two people who
can only admit to each other their fear and isolation. Not that the movie, of
course, gets quite that explicit about it.

I could
actually follow the plot of Die Another
Day, and I don’t know when the last time was I could say that about a Bond
film. The film has an excellent second female character and a few action
sequences that are impressive even by modern standards (I was especially taken
by the car chase inside the melting ice palace). So on this occasion, I was a
satisfied customer. It occurs to me that this may be the film’s greatest skill
– to have tweaked the formula just enough that even an old skeptic like me can
swallow it. Well, after forty years, they ought to have the audience
manipulation thing nailed by now.

Harry Potter

Since
we’re talking franchise movies, I’ll report as well that I went to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
On this occasion I had the advantage (or not), very rare for me, of having read
the book – albeit in French (very slowly, over a period of many months with
frequent detours to the dictionary – but I stuck with it!) Maybe it loses in
translation, but the book seemed to me a bit of a mess – certainly it’s not the
most artful of structures.

This
problem is carried wholesale into the movie. Most critics regard Chamber of Secrets as an improvement on
the first film, but I really can’t see why. I thought the first film was kept
aloft by a boy’s sense of wonder and discovery, but maybe that’s because in
that instance I hadn’t read the book.
The second film has a businesslike air that leaves most of the characters on the
sidelines (even Hermione, supposedly a key character, has almost no functional
role and what feels like barely more than ten lines). It improves on the book
in some ways through simple compression, but ends up feeling just as arbitrary.
Much more than the first, I think this movie is only for the fans. Others have
already started looking ahead to the third film, which is to be directed by
Alfonso Cuaron, the director of Y tu Mama
tambien. They expect a harder-edged Harry Potter movie, which would
certainly be better art, and may well be a shrewd move in terms of protecting
the franchise.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).